EMC SRM Suite Tackles Virtual Storage Management

Cloud and storage giant EMC has released its Storage Resource Management (SRM) suite, which includes the company’s ProSphere, Storage Configuration Advisor and Watch4net platforms.

SRM is designed to deliver application and storage management for cloud-based environments. The suite provides performance, capacity and configuration management for a wide variety of EMC arrays, including VMAX, VNX, VPLEX, Isilon and DataDomain, as well as select third-party storage arrays for both file and block.

Cloud Storage

The suite also features real-time reporting for visibility into resources and performance dependencies from the application to the host, down to the storage array, storage service alignment to analyse storage workload trends in order to align storage tiers to application service levels, Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) optimisation, service-level compliance to help manage and respond to service-level deviations through custom thresholds and dashboards across heterogeneous storage, and the ability to analyse application performance through trending and threshold notifications and correlate these with storage metrics.

“The EMC SRM suite is helping customers continue to transform themselves into cloud-enabled businesses simply and cost effectively. Companies need to ensure that the appropriate service levels are being delivered to a wide range of applications, even with rapidly growing, changing and complex IT environments,” Bob Laliberte, a senior analyst with IT analytics firm Enterprise Strategy Group, said in a prepared statement. “With the SRM suite, EMC is helping businesses understand the big picture of how storage impacts their applications – a critical ability for any company with highly virtualised/cloud environments.”

The SRM suite gives insight into virtualised IT infrastructure layers by providing visibility into the physical and virtual relationship, which could help reduce complexity at a time when organisations are struggling to handle swiftly rising data storage needs. According to a June 2011 report from IT research firm IDC, data managed by enterprise data centres will grow 50 percent, and the number of files will grow by 75 percent.

Total Visibility

“The combination of these three products will allow us to have a full 360-degree view of our storage infrastructure. ProSphere has given us great insight into our current storage environment capacity and performance. Adding Storage Configuration Advisor will allow us to have a better hold on storage changes and assist us in applying recommended standards,” Johan Marais, a storage and virtualisation administrator with Discovery Holding, an EMC customer, said in a press statement.

“Completing the solution with Watch4net will give us sight into application health and performance all the way to the storage layer allowing us to adhere to stricter SLAs [service-level agreements],” he said.

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